ABOUT THIS ALBUM

Album Notes

Josh Hodges is Sexton Blake. He came out of nowhere two years ago with the brilliant self-titled debut “Sexton Blake.” That album was a critical success, garnering Sexton Blake numerous comparisons to Elliott Smith and Pinback, among others. The Music Liberation Project exclaimed: “This is, by far, my favorite album this season.” Copper Press called it “a fantastic debut from this young, inspired multi-instrumentalist,” imploring readers to “track it down any way you can.” Similarly, the Oregon Music Guide heralded it as “a DIY classic.”

Plays The Hits! takes Sexton Blake’s singular sound into new territories. Josh Hodges has carefully chosen thirteen songs from the 70s, 80s and 90s and skillfully made them uniquely “Sexton Blake.” Josh spent hundreds of hours listening to hundreds of songs, trying to come up with the perfect collection - songs that Josh thought Sexton Blake could breathe new life into. Some, like “Bette Davis Eyes”, “Evil Woman”, “Hungry Heart”, “Young Turks” and “Daniel”, are classics. With others, like “I Need Love”, “Girl You Know It’s True”, and “Rush Rush”, Sexton Blake takes songs from different genres and sounds and transforms them into great works of indie pop. Every single song is great.

As In Music We Trust magazine’s Alex Steininger put it: “This may be the greatest covers album of all time!” But Sexton Blake doesn’t need it to be the greatest covers album of all time. Josh would be happy if it simply served to introduce fans of Sexton Blake, and indie pop, to some great songs they might not be familiar with. Similarly, this album will likely serve to introduce fans of these great songs, to a critically acclaimed indie artist from Portland, Oregon. One thing is for sure, Plays The Hits! will become a must-have for every fan of intelligent covers and great indie pop.

No other acoustic musician can hold a candle to the brilliance of Sexton Blake. His album plays the hits is loaded with 80s covers done all acoustic style and OMFG they are SO GOOD. Seriously straight up double style OMFG @ milli vanilli’s “girl you know it’s true” For realz though, this whole album is like Sufjan, Sam Beam, Sean Lennon, Elliott Smith and Sebadoh all rolled up into one FUCKING AWESOME TASTING CAKE THAT HAS A FEW CANDLES ON IT AND YOU ARE BLOWING THEM OUT AFTER YOU JUST GOT BACK FROM ROLLERSKATING AT YOUR BIRTHDAY PARTY AND NOW FOR SOME REASON YOUR BIRTHDAY IS NOW TURNING INTO A MONTAGE

Probably the most interesting and daring concept for an album in recent memory, it consists of Sexton covering the likes of Rod Stewart, LL Cool J, Paula Abdul, Erasure, Air Supply, and Milli Vanilli. Here that music is transmuted from moronic to moving, profane to profound. That's right, Sexton Blake makes Milli Vanilli profound. And not just Milli, the effect is universal throughout this disc. Should the planets align themselves properly, we can look forward to a lifetime of their art wafting from our collective speakers.

Sexton Blake does these 13 songs right, showing what a little bit of lo-fi fuzz-pop magic can do with the classics. Sexton Blake displays what a cover really should sound like; he brings out a side of the song that one might not have detected before, breathing new life into it and interpreting it in a way that only he can. Sexton Blake gets to the kernel of each of these songs and brings out the best of each of them.

Sexton . . . is a band with a talent for stripping iconic songs from decades gone by into their simplest form.
This is . . . an amazingly intimate sounding album. Despite being pulled from a wide range of artists, each song is built of equal measures of acoustical grace and the ethereal voice of Hodges. That’s no small feat, by the way; to be able to flow from Milli Vanilli into Paula Abdul into Elton John, and so on takes grace and talent.

This album] is really good. Not only is it really good, but it grows on you a lot. When I first met Josh Hodges two years ago, an ’80s covers album is the last thing I would have expected out of his band, Sexton Blake, but the thing is for real. FOR REAL!

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